“The Quabbin Reservoir covers almost 40 square miles, and has more than 100 miles of shoreline. It was built in the late 1920’s to provide water for the eastern part of Massachusetts. Five towns in the Swift River Valley were seized and razed to make the project possible.” –Mary Smith, “Birding the Quabbin”
Dana, Enfield, Prescott, Greenwich, New Salem;
perhaps because they sound female, somehow
acquainted, you perceive the basin’s blue lips:
lined with fiery maple as in autumn, retaining
the cold sleeping faces of evacuated women.
There is a need to contemplate Dana
only because Dana was the first, recessing
into metaphor: her antiquated skirts
overlarge and dusty at the fringe, whose pleats
disgrace our sense of modesty and thirst.
The clapboard stores that persist
in reminiscence; the soapstone shafts
of mines submerged in an era; notions
that bear the lead-weight of memory
despite captivity in watershed.
Terrible, to dam the arms of the Swift
and see them lift to islands, from hilltops—
only because it is terrible to see passion
replaced by what is normal and needed, with
scant suggestions of shore and receded sand.
They broke the earth. They stole the loam
and left a sandy plot—the hallowed stones still
around were overturned, bodies reinterred
in foreign ground—what’s worst is the thought
that flood can penetrate the burial mound.